For Clean, Smart and Profitable Farming.

Government Agriculture Schemes

AP Government providing Funds for procurement of agricultural commodities

Agriculture Minister Somireddi Chandramohan Reddy said, The State government has spent Rs. 1,602 crore on procurement of agricultural commodities under Minimum Support Price (MSP), Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) and Market Intervention Scheme (MIS) during the last four years. The outgo on MSP and MIS was far higher than the previous government’s Rs. 358 crore for 10 years.

The Minister was replying to an issue — MSP and market intervention scheme — raised by MLAs Y.Sambasiva Rao, D. Bala Veeranjaneya Swamy and Arimilli Radhakrishna under rule 344 in Assembly on Friday.

The Minister said that the government procured maize, jowar, millets, black gram, green gram, red gram, bengal gram, black jaggery and turmeric under the MSP/MIS. The Central government would not declare the MSP for certain cash crops like turmeric, chillies and also products like black jaggery. On case to case basis, sometimes the Central government would sanction MIS but for fixed quantity. It created a lot of unrest among the farming community and avoidable negative publicity to the government. So, the government introduced price support scheme for red chillies and market intervention activity was taken up for onions and tomatoes to help the farmers, he said.

The government had procured 5.44 lakh MT of agricultural commodities like maize, jowar and pulses. In addition, 55.57 lakh MT of paddy was procured from 2012-13 to 2016-17. The total paddy purchased under MSP was 39.54 lakh metric tonnes (LMTs). The paddy shifted for custom milling was 39.42 LMT, he said.